Can you imagine working for a company that has a little
more than 500 employees and

has the following statistics:

* 29 have been accused of spousal abuse

* 7 have been arrested for fraud

* 19 have been accused of writing bad checks

* 117 have directly or indirectly bankrupted at least
2 businesses

* 3 have done time for assault

* 71 cannot get a credit card due to bad credit

* 14 have been arrested on drug-related charges!

* 8 have been arrested for shoplifting

* 21 are currently defendants in lawsuits

* 84 have been arrested for drunk driving in the last
year

Can you guess which organization this is?

Give up yet?

It's the 535 members of the United States Congress. The
same group of idiots that

crank out hundreds of new laws each year designed to
keep the rest of us in line.

Comment

From Mike Nelson

3-20-4

Good advice, but unfortunately it's presented with some
glurgiously bad examples.

We'll tackle the second half first. It has some good
points, namely that by selectively choosing which facts to report, you
can make just about anyone look good or bad. It also (perhaps unintentionally)
provides an example demonstrating that facts offered out of context can
be more misleading than no facts at all: Hitler's diet was primarily vegetarian
throughout the latter part of his life; however, he didn't adopt a vegetarian
diet for moral reasons, but because he suffered from gastric problems.

Still, some of the semantic trickery used here makes
this a rather poor example. Hitler had affairs with several women (some
of whom died under mysterious circumstances), but they weren't technically
"extramarital" affairs because he wasn't married. Playing games
with language might also be part of the lesson here, but we suspect that
whoever crafted this piece included some misinformation by mistake, not
by design.

The Beethoven example is egregiously misleading. Beethoven
was born well over two hundred years ago, in an era when the infant mortality
was quite high by modern standards, and even infants who survived were
often afflicted with serious health problems. Children didn't die or experience
physical problems so frequently back then simply because they were all
born to mothers who were themselves in poor health, as is implied here.
Offering an 18th century example in a 20th century setting is a very poor
way of making a serious point.

Also, Beethoven was not born to a woman who "had
8 kids already." Although his mother, Maria Magdalena Laym (nee Kewerich)
gave birth a total of eight times during her lifetime, Ludwig was only
her third child. (Her first two children, one from a previous marriage,
both died in infancy.) Only two of Beethoven's five younger siblings survived
beyond their first few years of their life.

Even if we take this example at face value, its message
is still problematic. If the woman in the example had been advised to abort
her pregnancy based on the (mis)information supplied here, the world would
never have known the magic of Beethoven's music. But maybe a different
woman who did opt to terminate her pregnancy might have spared the world
another Stalin or Hitler. This is the sort of speculative "What if?"
game that neither side can win, so it's best not to play at all.